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  • 52 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 11th, 2024

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  • I can list random things I noticed

    • KDE essential apps are often more powerful, like Gwenview (the only modern FOSS viewer with many edit capabilities) or Okular. Installing them works but the theme may look ugly and it pulls in half of the DE
    • some core apps like Spectacle or the powerful search / krunner cannot be used
    • no wayland support means you are restricted to ancient insecure technology
    • the filemanager is extremely restricting in comparison to dolphin. Like afaik you cannot even add arbitrary folders to the sidebar! They are linked to a “favourites” folder or something, very annoying. I assume it has no filtering either. The date display in list view is pretty ugly by default, maybe that can be changed

    I dont use Cinnamon lol, for reasons. Too many family members blindly used it and I hate it.

    since I have a terminal at my fingertips

    This is not what a DE is for. If you need a terminal, the DE is not good. I also heavily use the terminal but I am talking about a good general use desktop.

    weird selection of apps has me lost

    They diverge from GNOME for theming or whatever, and either have weird apps for things like PDF viewing preinstalled, or the people that used it preinstalled those.

    As it is neither KDE nor GNOME, it kinda uses GNOME apps but not really. Simply a pretty bad situation. On KDE I use a bunch of GNOME apps and thanks to libadwaita they all look and works fine. That is actually an antifeature of KDE apps, but if you are on KDE they are fine XD

    comes with stuff installed that you might expect

    That always results in opinionated defaults. People seem to get along fine and I still have a vanilla LMDE VM I have not tried.

    I also don’t know what you mean by filtering flathub.

    Then maybe look it up ;) it is easy to find. Deb packages have way more attack surface than flatpaks, making this even worse. People install spotify as an unrestricted deb package instead of in a sandbox for example. Fucking spotify.

    so you can apt or apt-get install

    It is a DE for people who literally know nothing about Linux. The GUI store needs sensible defaults and it doesnt really have those currently due to their controversial (and unsafe) decision to hide unverified flatpaks





  • Edit: after reading the post, the below is not really relevant to the blog post


    Interesting one

    I guess it is fair that nobody wants to deal with GNOME and their reluctance of theming. I like theming and despise “light” (white) themes or not well readable dark themes (that dont save any energy on non-OLED displays).

    I am on KDE, using GNOME at work (it is okay but worse in like 20 aspects I regularly use). Tried COSMIC on lower end hardware and it was not great.

    I like that they support theming but agree, their desktop is pretty ugly.

    Tho I use GNOME with dash-to-panel and blur-my-shell as well as the breeze cursor. The default theme is kinda weird (not blurring wastes potential) and the macOS like top bar is worse to use and wastes screen space (most importantly on Laptops).

    GNOME is way worse than KDE, COSMIC has a couple of nice things but is worse than GNOME still for my use cases. No surprises.

    I have to stress though that statically linked binaries are not good. Many distros shipping COSMIC use those, wasting RAM, optimisations and potentially vendoring outdated dependencies.

    I also believe people when they dislike C++ and say KDE has a messy codebase. So I very much hope that COSMIC (with a substantial theme) can replace KDE for me. But I highly doubt that.

    More importantly is, how old DEs make the transition from C and C++ to Rust, Zig, Go or whatever else you prefer.

    With Windows going all in on Javascript you can see how not to do it XD




  • KDE is better than Cinnamon, period. Apart from really old hardware (where Cinnamon is faster for some reason), KDE is way less restricting, way more modern and also very intuitive.

    Cinnamon works, but is simply worse. Many powerful apps are KDE apps, while Cinnamon is GTK based, so you cannot even install them without loading an entire different graphics framework in RAM.

    I get that a Debian->Ubuntu base is the most standard, and Ubuntu does weird stuff. But Mint also does weird stuff, like having a weird selection of apps, filtering flathub and more.